Gavrilo Princip

The spark that ignited World War I

"I am not a criminal, for I destroyed a bad man. I thought I was right."
— Gavrilo Princip at his trial

June 28, 1914, was a beautiful sunny day in Sarajevo. Gavrilo Princip
sat alone and disconsolate at a sidewalk café having coffee. He and his friends had just failed to execute their mission;
to kill the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne Archduke Franz
Ferdinand. They had lost a chance to strike a blow for Serbian
independence.

Earlier in the day, Ferdinand and his wife Sophie had arrived by
train on an official visit to Sarajevo. The archduke’s advisors knew
that a visit to Sarajevo was dangerous because there was a lot of unrest
among the populace, but they also knew that it was their duty to go
there and "show the flag."

Appearances were an important part of keeping the empire together, but
they weren’t going to take any unnecessary risks. Ferdinand and
Sophie’s motorcade was to travel to city hall for welcoming
ceremonies, and 120 Sarajevo policemen had been assigned to the parade
route. Princip and the other members of the assassination team had also
spaced themselves out and blended into the crowds that lined the parade
route.

As the open car carrying the Archduke and his wife approached,
Nedjelko Cabrinovic, one of Princip’s co-conspirators, threw a bomb,
but it bounced off the car and landed in the street. The bomb exploded
under the car that followed, injuring two in the car and several in the
crowd. While Cabrinovic was being arrested, the Archduke’s car sped
off and eliminated any chance of another assassination attempt.

Nedjelko Cabrinovic

As Princip sipped his coffee, he must have reflected on how and why he
had arrived at this moment. He believed that killing the Archduke was
the key to setting events in motion that would result in Serbia
asserting its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire and then
uniting with Bosnia. Ferdinand had already indicated that once he
ascended to the throne, he intended to give Serbia a greater voice in
running its own affairs. The Empire was practically on life-support as
it was, so Serbian and Bosnian radicals couldn’t allow a compromise to
spoil their plans. The Archduke had to be eliminated.

Gavrilo Princip was born in 1894 in Bosnia, the son of a postman and the
fourth of nine children. He attended high school in Sarajevo and Tuzla.
When Austria-Hungry seized his homeland in 1908, he became a member of
Mlada Bosna ("Young Bosnia"), a radical student group
dedicated to freeing Bosnia from the grip of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. Gavrilo attempted to join the Serbian army, but was turned down
for being too small and weak. He was recruited by a Serbian
revolutionary organization called the Black Hand in 1912.

The leader of the Black Hand was Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, also
known as Apis (Bee) the Chief of the Intelligence Department of the
Serbian General Staff. He had hatched the plan to kill the Archduke and
recruited Princip and two other men from a coffeehouse in Sarajevo.
Though it was clearly a suicide mission, it was an easy sell for
"the Bee" because his new recruits were all burning with
revolutionary fire as well as tuberculosis. At that time (nearly 100
years ago) that was as good as a death sentence. They knew that they
would die soon and so had nothing to lose.

Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic

The trio was brought to Serbia for partisan training and then were each
given a revolver, two bombs, and a small vial of cyanide. They were
instructed to commit suicide after the assassination so that the plot
could not be traced back to Serbia.

Before the plan could be launched, Nikola Pasic, Serbia’s prime
minister, heard about the plot and ordered Princip and his
co-conspirators arrested when they attempted to enter Bosina. His orders
were ignored though, and the trio easily slipped into Sarajevo. All went
according to plan—till they blew their chance when the moment of truth
arrived.

While Princip was finishing his coffee and pondering what had gone wrong,
the Archduke’s car arrived at city hall. He mounted the podium and the
mayor of Sarajevo began his speech as if nothing had happened. Archduke
Ferdinand was quite annoyed and interrupted "What is the good of
your speeches? I come to Sarajevo on a visit, and I get bombs thrown at
me. It is outrageous!" That was the end of the speeches and they
all went inside.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie

The Archduke inquired about the injured and was told that they were at
the hospital. Ferdinand said he wanted to visit them, but a member of
his staff suggested that the trip might be dangerous. General Oskar
Potiorek, the Governor of Bosnia scoffed, "Do you think Sarajevo is
full of assassins?" Potiorek then suggested that it might be
prudent for Sophie to remain at city hall, but she refused saying,
"As long as the Archduke shows himself in public today, I will not
leave him."

Poor Sophie should have listened to Potiorek, but she insisted on
staying with Ferdinand because this trip was one of the few times that
she had been allowed to appear with her husband in an official ceremony.
Back in Vienna, Sophie was an outcast in royal circles because Ferdinand
had married below his station. She was not allowed to appear beside him
in any official functions in Austria. Ironically, her participation in
the ceremonies in Sarajevo was supposed to be a wedding anniversary
treat.

It was decided that they would all go to the hospital. In what can best
be described as either an ill-advised display of bravado or monumental
stupidity, the motorcade took the same route they had traveled before.
Along the way the Archduke’s driver took a wrong turn that put Europe
on the road to war. Princip was astonished to see the royal car pass
right in front of the café where he was standing. When the
driver realized that he was going the wrong way, he stopped and began to
back up slowly. Princip stepped forward to within
five feet of the car, took out his revolver, and fired two shots.

Ferdinand was hit in the neck and Sophie was hit in the abdomen. He
pleaded "Sophie dear! Sophie dear! Don’t die! Stay alive for our
children!" But Sophie was already dead and Ferdinand would be dead
within a few moments.

Princip fires the fatal shots

After firing the fatal shots, Princip attempted to turn the gun on
himself, but it was knocked out of his hand by an onlooker. He then
swallowed the cyanide he had been issued, but it was so old it only made
him vomit. He was arrested by police and according to one account,
"They beat him over the head with the flat of their swords. They
knocked him down, they kicked him, scraped the skin from his neck with
the edges of their swords, tortured him, all but killed him." No
doubt at that point Princip was wishing they would kill him and get it
over with.

The arrest of Gavrilo Princip

Austria-Hungary demanded that Princip and the other assassins be turned
over, but Serbia refused, citing its sovereignty and right to try them
under Serbian law. Eventually Serbia gave in, but by then it was too
late. As a direct result of the assassination, Austria-Hungary declared
war on Serbia on July 28, 1914. Because of various treaties and defense
agreements between European countries, one nation after another took
sides and the end result was the first World War.

Gavrilo Princip at trial

Meanwhile, Princip was quickly convicted of murder, but because of his
age he could only be sentenced to 20 years in prison. He died of
tuberculosis in 1918 at the age of 24 at the hospital of Theresienstadt
prison.

For many years after,
Gavrilo Princip was celebrated as a national hero of
Yugoslavia. A museum was dedicated to Princip in Sarajevo at
the corner where the event happened, along with a wall plaque and his
footprints embedded in the pavement. When Yugoslavia disintegrated in
the 1990s, ethnic differences resulted in war between Bosnia and
Serbia. Attitudes changed and Bosnia then considered Princip a terrorist and an unwitting dupe
of Serbia. The museum, plaque, and footprints were removed for a few
years, but shortly after hostilities between Bosnia and Serbia ended
they were replaced with a museum that commemorates the historical
importance of the event rather than a tribute to Princip.

Museum at the corner where the fatal shots were fired
& a close-up of the plaque

Princip’s actions that day will always be considered one of the
defining moments of the 20th Century. The ultimate costs of World War One in lives and property were truly
staggering. In four years of war, over half of the 42 million men who
were mobilized became casualties. Over 8 million soldiers and 6 million
civilians died. It has been estimated that the war cost the Allies $125
billion and the Central Powers $60 billion, but the costs of the war
went far beyond lives and property.

The victors were not kind to the vanquished. The Allies sought revenge
by forcing Germany to pay huge sums as war reparations. The German
economy collapsed under the weight of those reparations, causing great
disaffection and disillusionment among its youth. That set the stage
for Hitler to come to power in Germany and drag the entire
world into another war just twenty years later.